Everyone knows of the dangers of speaking freely in, say, the Soviet Union, at least during certain periods and on certain matters. Now Macdara is in favour of free speech, especially when it comes to pointing out corruption, or otherwise critiquing the State for failure to deliver against its ideals. He is less concerned with free speech as it might affect artists, because all art is created within a set of material and ideological conditions: writing for the popular market, for example, requires observing and subverting various restrictions. Any artist should find a way of continuing her production even in an environment in which the work is to be scrutinised, though it must have been scary in the extreme to do so when the Stalinist Terror was at its height. In the darkest times of Shostakovich’s denunciation, he continued his creative production privately, the desk drawer works that were eventually taken out and performed as he fell into favour again.

There is however little of free speech about newspapers or broadcasters. A true free speech regime would supply all citizens with education and a laptop, and shut down all media organs. The media apparatus reflects the concerns of the ownership class, those who own property, businesses and—of course—the media apparatus itself. Their interest in free speech is exclusively in their rights to opine at length and loudly about the issues affecting them, and to threaten revenge upon any regime that might favour the rights of People over Capital. For the elites who courageously exercise the right to press their own interests, freedom of speech is taken to be emblematic of freedom as such, notwithstanding the technologies of unfreedom deployed very obviously against the citizenry. In short, free speech is the means they have found to have control over public discourse.

For capitalist critics of the Soviet Union, it is a given that speaking freely (that is, behaving like a heroic Capitalist) was only one short step from being killed in the gulag. It is a favoured technique of these people to add up those killed under the regimes of Existing Socialism, but it is far more difficult to find figures for those killed under Capitalism: those who are dying of poverty, stress, treatable medical conditions; those who die from carrying out dangerous work. Or those who have died in genocides and wars fomented by Capitalist regimes from the Liberal Empires of the past to the familiar invasions of our own lifetimes.

O but these are not interesting people to think about, since Capitalist persecution is normal. Persecution for freedom of speech in the countries attempting to achieve Socialism is far worse, for the elites of Capitalo-Democracy, than persecution of the poor under Capitalism. Even though in the former case the ambiguities of language, tone, facial expression, silence, physical presence or absence, can still communicate—even leaving aside the samizdat and joke-telling that were well-attested features of Soviet life—and in the latter case you die frozen under a bridge, or perhaps by jumping off one. Or are torn apart in your home by weapons made by the richest countries in the world.